State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events (STEVE)

The STEVE System is being developed to provide a secure, electronic method to exchange birth, death and fetal death records that occur in California to non-California residents with the person’s jurisdiction of usual residence for statistical and research purposes. Death records are also sent to the jurisdiction of the decedent’s birth for fraud prevention (to match and mark the birth record “deceased”). The governance for this exchange of vital event information has been administered by the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (NAPHSIS) using the Inter-Jurisdictional Exchange (IJE) Agreement.

Project Scope

The STEVE System will provide many benefits, such as;

Exchanging information to exchange electronically in seconds instead of in weeks through paper-based processes will improve efficiency;

Including events that occurred to California residents, irrespective of where the births and deaths occurred, will improve our ability to evaluate crucial public health issues, to accurately calculate population estimates, and to purge benefit, election and other rolls; and,

Improving the instances of birth/death cross matching through more timely receipt of out-of-state death information will decrease the use of birth certificates for the creation of false identities.